and school than those who have hard of hearing parents (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2005,
p. 243). Ninety-two percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents
and it is very likely that these deaf children are not exposed to ASL at
home with their families (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004), so they usually
acquire ASL at schools where deaf children use ASL as the communication
medium with their peers and the school employees. However, ASL as
the medium of classroom instruction has never been unchallenged. There
have been many attempts in the past 150 years to replace ASL with oral
and visual–kinetic communication systems that are designed to express
the constructions of English (Baynton, 1996; Lane et al., 1996).

History of Deaf Education in America

Before the 1860s, deaf schools in America used manual-based instruction,
meaning that the instructors and school staff signed with deaf students.
Although the schools were concerned about deaf students’ abilities
to read and write English, they did not place great emphasis on the students’
oral communication skills (Baynton, 1996; Lane et al., 1996). In
fact, instructors were more concerned about subject-matter content that
deaf students received than how well they developed oral communication
skills. During the 1860s, a movement began to make U.S. deaf schools
exclusively oral. This change reflected the situation in Europe, where oralism
had gained greater momentum. During a conference of educators
held in Milan in September 1880, delegates from deaf schools in France,
Italy, several other European countries, and the United States debated
the mode of communication to be used in deaf education. The American
delegates had serious reservations about the effectiveness of instructing
deaf students through oral means of communication, but the Europeans
were impassioned about the need to restore deaf children to mainstream
society, which they said could be done only by banning sign languages
from schools and encouraging students to lipread and use the spoken
language of their respective countries (Gallaudet, 1881). The resolutions
passed at the closing of the conference ensured the dominance of oralism,
and the deaf schools in the United States and Europe underwent major
changes that affected not only Deaf students but also Deaf instructors,
future generations of Deaf graduates, the livelihood of the Deaf community,
and ultimately Deaf culture.

In the United States, most Deaf instructors were replaced by hearing instructors
to nurture students’ speech and residual hearing abilities. Every
year, some deaf students failed to develop speech acceptable to hearing
instructors and administrators, even after many years of speech training. In addition, the
schools’ focus on oral communication skills overshadowed
instruction in academic subjects (Baynton, 1996; Lane et al., 1996). Deaf
students could not acquire language normally through the oral mode of
communication, which affected their learning of academic content. Academic
expectations for deaf students were then lowered because they did
not learn at the same rate as their hearing peers.

Oralism continued to dominate American deaf education until the second
half of the 20th century, when questions were raised about the benefits
of teaching deaf students through oral-only instruction and research
studies confirmed the status of ASL as a natural language (see Stokoe et
al., 1965; Stokoe, 1972; Klima & Bellugi, 1979). After years of consistently
poor performance in reading, writing, and academic subjects, some
educators realized that deaf students needed to communicate visually in
order to learn well. However, after a long period of repeated attempts to
supplant ASL, it was difficult for many to embrace ASL as a natural medium
of instruction (Lane et al., 1996). Common misconceptions about
ASL abounded: ASL is broken English, ASL is a gestural system with a
flexible or nonexistent grammar, ASL is too conceptual to be a language,
ASL does not have abstract forms, ASL is not a language because it has
no written form, and ASL is a crutch for deaf children that hampers their
development of written English (Lane et al., 1996; Schein & Stewart,
1995; Wilcox & Wilcox, 1997; Liddell, 2003). These misconceptions fed
the skepticism about the linguistic status of ASL.

Current State of Deaf Education in America

Deaf schools have been the crucibles for the acquisition and maintenance
of ASL (Lucas, Bayley, & Valli, 2001, p. 52). Even though deaf
schools went through the period of oralism when sign language was
banned from the classroom, Deaf students secretly used ASL with each
other and ASL was continually passed on from older children to younger
children. Most deaf schools eventually dismantled the oralist practice,
but condescending attitudes and misconceptions about ASL remained.
Based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, Mitchell and
Karchmer reported that the number of deaf and hard of hearing students
per thousand school-age population decreased from 1.2% in 1976 to
less than 1.0% in 1986 but increased in 1993 to 1.1%, where it has remained
stable (2006, pp. 96–97). Although the number of deaf and hard
of hearing children has been approximately the same, the number of children
attending special schools and programs for the deaf has decreased because of the
rise of mainstreaming.[8]
Before the 1960s, almost 80% of
U.S. deaf children attended residential schools for the deaf (Lane et al.,
1996, p. 244); by 2010, the percentage had declined to 24.3% (Gallaudet
Research Institute, 2011). The implication is that because the combination
of speech and signs, most likely Simultaneous Communication, is used in
some mainstream programs, more deaf and hard of hearing students have
been exposed to it than before.

In deaf schools (including residential schools and special educational
centers for the deaf), deaf and hard of hearing students stay together and
enjoy the advantages of having accessible visual communication in every
aspect of school life. Mainstreamed deaf and hard of hearing students do
not have the same advantages. They tend to be widely distributed among
neighborhood schools, and the schools have an extremely low number of
deaf and hard of hearing students relative to the rest of the school population
(Mitchell & Karchmer, 2006, pp. 95, 99). Mitchell and Karchmer
report that, based on the Gallaudet Research Institute’s 2002–2003 Annual
Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth, 80% of
the participating schools serving deaf and hard of hearing students in the
mainstream setting have three or fewer deaf and hard of hearing students,
accounting for 40% of the 40,282 deaf and hard of hearing students
reported in that survey (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2006, p. 99; Gallaudet
Research Institute, 2003). In addition, almost one of every five deaf and
hard of hearing students in mainstreaming is the only such student in his
or her school (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2006, 99).

Within mainstreaming, there are four different kinds of instructional
settings for deaf and hard of hearing students: regular education, resource
rooms, and two different forms of self-contained classrooms (Karchmer
& Mitchell, 2003; Stinson & Kluwin, 2003). In a regular education setting,
deaf and hard of hearing students receive the same instruction as
their hearing peers in all classes, with or without special accommodation.
A resource room is similar to the regular education setting except
that the students need to report to a few classes with special education
teachers and receive specialized educational services catering to deaf and
hard of hearing students. One form of self-contained classroom is the
setting where deaf and hard of hearing students stay with special education
teachers for most of their classes, which tends to be isolated from the rest of
the facilities for hearing students. Another form of self-contained classroom is
a residential deaf school, where students may attend some classes while
attending other classes in another educational facility serving hearing
students.

8.
Mainstreaming is the practice of integrating deaf and hard of hearing students,
as well as students with disabilitiesn, with nondisabled students in regular
classrooms with appropriate accommodation.